“Yeah, we seem to see a lot of things differently.”
I didn’t think that deserved a reply, and I suspect my look told him so. I tasted the penne. “That’s ready, drain it and mix it in cold water.”
He pulled out the colander. “Don’t tell me what to do, I know how to cook fucking pasta.”
My vegetable dressing tasted perfect. I added one more dash of pepper, then pushed the bowl towards him. “Fine then, you finish it. If I’m such an overbearing person you maybe want to talk to Margie about it, see if she’ll assign you to Angelica. I’m sure she’d love to get a crack at rounding off her tour of men. You get sex, I don’t have to cook with you; everyone’s happy.”
The timer for the oven went off as I left the room, so whatever Caleb may or may not have said was lost in the buzz and the slamming door.
Fine then. Being alone gave me a chance to throw myself into my art, which had been suffering some neglect. I worked with the quick assurance and precision I loved but only found in maybe thirty percent of my labors. I woke up in the middle of the night with a clear plan for the patch about Jason, how to put me in his temple as both individual and a generic Venus from his brain. Since I had just the right fabric scrap for the marble-look of my figure, I got up to dig through the box until I found it. As pitch dark as it was in the country at two a.m., the windows reflected back the colors and motion in my studio, fish-bowlish and yet safely encompassing in the silence. I sat at the machine, and stitched, and cut, and basted, and sang along to the old country tunes on the radio, and drank a lot of water, and worked.
I was becoming all too aware of the time during this reign of Margie’s food schedules—I should have gone to a normal retreat where they didn’t make you cook the communal meal. So I knew it was just past five when the dawn light intruded into my space. My spine screeched as I stood, and my eyes were gritty and dry. The radio was playing some post-Gambler Kenny Rogers, which I never much liked anyway, so I switched it off.
I’d done good. The patch for Jason was as close to my mind’s eye as I ever got, and technically it shined. It only took a couple of moments for me to iron it flat and hot and press it against my hanging felt.
The birds were intent on their business. Caleb would probably be up among them, unless he’d been up too late with the raccoons. Rolling my shoulders under the pulse of the shower sent me deeper and deeper towards comatose. I didn’t even put my clothes on, just climbed under the sheets with a towel on my head and one around my chest. It was Sunday. No one was looking for me. I slept for hours, dressed, munched some cereal in the kitchen, walked up the river an easy ways with my coffee, then went back to ValeSong and slept through lunch.
The thing is, with that second nap, I’d cried myself to sleep. It was unexpected. It made me mad. Since when does Ashlyn May cry herself to sleep over a man? Then I cried some more and told my pillow I was really crying because I was mad he’d made me feel like crying, and then told my pillow (it was skeptical about the first reason) really I was crying because of the pent up worry about Gran, and not knowing what to tell Zach, and what had happened in my life to make my own mother scared to talk to me. (The pillow let me get away with that, though it pointed out my worries were hardly pent up, what with my sharing them with everyone I could get my hands on. I told it to shut up and balled it up into my chest and buried my head in it, and it relented softly.)
It was one of those groggy awakenings, confusing because of the afternoon light and the sheets which had gotten crumpled under my neck and ribs as I slept. Someone was knocking at my door—a refreshing change from the usual walking right in. My pillow was still damp and my legs were cold, and I barely breathed until I heard the steps walking down my porch.
Presumably it had been Caleb. There was a tray outside with a bowl of fruit salad and a cheese sandwich, but no note. It seemed to me he was making an awful lot of assumptions in bringing me a late lunch, but I was, after all, hungry, so I brought it inside. He was probably hiding behind the scrub oak taking pictures for his Food in the Wood series. I stuck my tongue out towards the trees, just in case.
At dinner I sat between Lizzy and Wren, and when Caleb passed me the salt before I’d tasted my tomatoes, I said, “No thank you,” even though, when I bit into the salad, it needed the extra flavor-boost.
On Monday we sat next to each other at breakfast and dinner but when he bumped into me with his shoulders I scooted my chair away, politely ensuring he had all the personal space he could ever need.
On Tuesday after lunch he caught up with me as I went back to finish up the Wig patch.
“Ash, babe, aren’t you ever going to talk to me?”
“Haven’t I asked you not to call me that?”
He blushed. His skin was such a lovely deep color that blushing was a cranberry affair for him, gentler than my own cherry-red flames. “I’m sorry.”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”
Silence. Then, “Can we go talk?”
“About what?”
Slightly more hostile silence. “About the fact you’re avoiding me for no good reason, maybe?”
“That’s not what I’m seeing. I just happen to be busy with my work at the moment.”
Definitely not silence as Caleb ripped a dry branch off of the mesquite and hurled it towards the creek. “Damn, Ash! Whatever the hell I did, and to tell you the truth, I don’t know what was so bad, is freezing me out like this really the way you’re going to deal with it? How the fuck is that fair to me?”
He was staring pretty nastily at me, but it was my turn to generate hostile silence. “Last I checked, screaming obscenities and throwing things wasn’t in the ‘How to achieve effective communication’ relationship guide, Caleb. Please excuse me now, I have some work to do.” And I turned slowly and paced myself until I was, presumably, out of his line of vision, then stomped back to my room to tell the pillow all about the latest agony in my life.
On Wednesday morning I was trying to sleep in again, having stayed up past two drinking coffee and pacing between the final assembly of the X patch, which was all a less than inspired plan of mine to make my stomach feel rightfully abused.
When Caleb came in and sat on the edge of the mattress and brushed the hair back from my cheek, my first half-asleep thought was of the wrenching sweetness that suffused me at his touch. Then as I woke enough to open my cracked eyes, I was flushed with irritation he’d invade my privacy, and that’s what I started to say when I sat up gruffly and moved my face away from his hand. And then, I saw my brother standing in the doorway behind him.
Both men told the same story with their eyes, and I knew it was not something I wanted to read. Looking at Caleb ripped me in half before I knew, so I looked at Zach and said, “What?” softly, and did not move.
So Zach had to come kneel at my bedside like I was an invalid, and lean his elbows on the sheet as he reached for my hand and answered, “We need to go see Gran, Ash. She had a stroke, and she’s not responding to anyone.” And then as I fell against him, he said, “I know, I know,” and for the first time I registered the red rims of his own frightened eyes.
I honestly do not know how I moved through the cold fog around me and ended up sitting between Caleb and Zach on the front bench seat of Zach’s car, headed to Houston with a thermos of coffee on my lap. Even it didn’t warm me.
Caleb was driving. Closing my eyes and reliving select parts of the previous forty minutes, I saw myself nodding to him as he wrapped a towel around me and said, “I’m coming with you, okay?” Glancing at him, I touched my damp hair. His, too, was slick, though I had no memory of him showering with me; where had Zach been during all of this? Embarrassment that my brother may have seen me naked stung worse than the thought of Caleb cleaning me without my realizing it, so I accepted the latter version of events.
Turning to view the back seat—brushing shoulders with Caleb—I took in the backpack stuffed with Zach’s clothes, Caleb’s camera bag and his vest full of the act
ual camera gear draped across it, and my small duffel full enough for the outline of my sandal pressed against the side was clear. It was the left one.
Zach’s voice turned me back around. “Are you hungry?” He reached forward into the foot space. “That Maggie woman packed up some fruit and some sort of, oh, they’re scones.” He held one towards me, but I shook my head. “Are you sure? They’re warm still.”
“You should eat.” Caleb.
He didn’t take his eyes off the road, didn’t speak my name. His voice was quiet, distant.
Zach hesitated, or maybe I just imagined it, and passed a scone to Caleb, then one to me. “You should both eat. Come on Caleb, I interrupted your breakfast.”
Instant mental video of Zach’s car puling up the Main House road; Caleb sitting in his usual chair at the foot of the table, about to take a bite of cereal; the two of them conferring on the porch, Caleb’s hand on Zach’s shoulder, and looking towards the cabin where I was still sleeping.
I opened the thermos and half-filled the wide, shallow plastic cup, then held it towards Caleb, taking the scone from his hand. “Here, drink this, I think it’s the Indonesian bean you like.”
He glanced at me then, and took it (the heat of the coffee and his magnet hand triggering a storm to finally wash away the fog), smiled his thanks.
Crying again, but quiet tears just looking for another place to be, I mustered the resolve to look at Zach with the questions he knew, sooner or later, I would ask. It was yet another blessing of my brother that I could be spared the actual voicing of those questions; I simply looked at him with my furrowed brow and he nodded and took my hand, told me about it.
Gran had talked to Bernadette on Tuesday—yesterday—after lunch, and she mentioned Mr. Weimer was going to drive her in for their grocery shopping that afternoon. When she didn’t show up at three-thirty on the dot, he knew something was odd, and not getting an answer from her phone, called Bernadette at the store. Even though he was next door and she was in Spring, she was barley five minutes behind him when they met at Gran’s house. He’d used the key under the potted hibiscus and let himself in, and found her, unresponsive, in the dining room. The municipal fire department’s EMS, with their oxygen tanks and their stretcher and their kindly rush of activity, was close behind Bernadette.
She was at the Medical Center downtown. Bernadette was with her. Frank had called Zach first thing in the morning, claiming he’d wanted to wait until they’d had some news from the doctors, but we knew he and Bernadette were just trying to manipulate us into one last peaceful night’s sleep. Little did they know.
Uncle Matthew was already on a plane out, but swore he didn’t want a lift from the airport, so we were going straight to the ICU.
“And she hasn’t …?”
“Frank said they didn’t think it was permanent brain damage, but she’ll have to wake up for the scan to be definitive.”
I nodded, sighed, stared as Caleb ran the wipers to try and clear the bug splats off the windshield. The coffee cup was resting on his thighs, and I replaced it with a scone. Zach poured himself the next cup while I sank into the seat.
It just didn’t seem credible. Gran wasn’t even on blood thinners like half her friends and she walked every day and had plans, she always said, to live into her hundreds. She said she refused to die before she’d taken a great-grandchild trick-or-treating. Maybe it was foolhardy, given she was in her nineties, but she’d been so rock-solid we had no trouble believing her.
Except last time I’d seen her, I’d taken a sledgehammer to her rock.
“Don’t, it’s not that,” Caleb murmured to me, holding my hand in his warm palm. I hadn’t realized I was so cold.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes I do.”
And the only way I could survive this trip was to believe him, so I clung to his assurance, and his hand, as if they held the deepest truth I’d ever know.
“Not what?” Zach wiped the cup out with a paper towel and screwed it onto the thermos.
“Not anything.” Caleb was firm. I was going to cry again if I couldn’t tell Zach about Pappa, but with a squeeze of my fingers Caleb told me I had to honor Gran’s request, even now.
So I was left holding a paper towel roughly to my eyes and raw nose, and shaking my head. “Nothing,” I sniffed, blew, rested my head on Zach’s shoulder. “Thanks for coming for us.”
He smiled, then. “Sure.” We were coming into Brookshire. Caleb must have been speeding rather relentlessly. “Hey, stop at the gas station, we’ll wash up a bit and stretch our legs. I’ll drive into town.”
“You sure?” God love Caleb, he was as concerned for Zach as he was for me.
“Yeah, it’s fine. It’s easier for me than telling you directions.”
Caleb nodded and signaled the exit. Suddenly I was desperate to pee, though I didn’t remember drinking anything that day. Maybe I just hadn’t yet been, between the men waking me up and cleaning me and loading me into the car.
The restroom was clean but hot, and I splashed cool water on my face and, towel-less, raked damp hands through my hair. My knees were rubber and the right calf was asleep. Goosebumps erupted on my forearms as I stepped back outside.
They’d cleaned some of the trash from the car and refueled. Caleb had bought me a jar of peach iced tea and himself a bottle of water. Zach finished off a chocolate bar and asked if we were ready to go.
The trip to the hospital was barely more than an hour, most of which I dozed away curled up under Caleb’s arm. It was close to lunchtime when we arrived, which meant the parking garages were near capacity, and after circling the lower levels for a few minutes, Zach finally headed for the uncovered roof spaces. We shut our bags in the trunk, and packed up the rest of the scones and a banana for Bernadette. She wouldn’t have left Gran’s side to eat.
The profusion of glass and stucco towers was briefly overwhelming and continuously intimidating, but we navigated through the signboards and cryptic posted maps until we found the right wing. Sixty-three percent sure we’d trespassed to get there and already confused about where the parking garage was, it was a near-Holy Grail experience to walk into the waiting area and actually find Frank sitting there. He looked as dazed as I felt, but he blinked it off and stood to hug the three of us.
“Frank, this is Caleb Kendall,” I said, once he’d released me but still, oddly, had his arm wrapped around Caleb’s shoulder. They rearranged themselves to shake hands. “You’re the one who was at Berkeley with Zach, right?”
Caleb affirmed while I darted a glance at Zach, who only arched an eyebrow and a half-shrugged shoulder at me. At any other time I’d have stung him for sharing my secrets, but right then it just wasn’t worth it.
“What’s happening? Can we go in?”
Frank reached for my hand. “They’re just checking her responses now, and the next visiting window is in twenty minutes. Your mom’s still in there with her, but they needed a little room, so I came out here.”
“Responses?” Zach was pale. Caleb eased us all into seats.
Frank nodded, rubbing his eyes. “Reflexes, audio and visual stimulation, that sort of thing.” He sighed again. “Your Gran hasn’t done much since they found her. They think it was at least four hours before Bernadette got there, and 911 ...”
“Four hours! But—”
Frank squeezed my hand again to quiet me. “It must have been right after Bernadette talked to her, it looked like she was making lunch.” Behind my eyes I saw the blue and white Corning-ware bowl she tossed her salads in sitting abandoned on her counter. Caleb moved me into his waiting arms, and I could feel, outside his warm envelope, the defeated slumps of Frank and Zach, who had both moved to hug me.
But then the nurse came by and told Frank we could see Gran again, but only two at a time. They all looked right at me and I stood without bothering to ask if I could be the one to join Bernadette in there. The nurse led me through the wide swinging doors, indicating where th
e intercom was for when I was trying to visit without her escort. I didn’t like that: the presumption I’d be back and forth with some frequency while my Gran was in ICU.
I looked at Bernadette first. Well, first after a painful glance at Gran, who was an inversion of her former self. Bernadette stood; we held each other. Then I moved past her, and took a good look at Gran.
She was intensely small under the nubby blue hospital blanket. I looked past the plastic tubing with their slow drops of liquid, at her chalk-dry skin and wrinkled lips, at her hair that needed a wide brush and mist of hairspray, at her softly closed eyes.
My one and only Gran. And then I cried. Bernadette leaned in over me, awkwardly encircled my shoulders, but didn’t talk.
I wanted Bernadette to go away, so I could take it in. So I could bend over Gran and hold her face between my hands and tell her I was sorry and if she would just wake up we could make it all better. So my grief and anger and love and fear could form a whirlwind of healing energy that would magically restore the Gran I’d seen the week before.
But even I recognized I couldn’t send Bernadette away, when it was her mother laying there in the bed before us. So I suffered her pincer-grip as if it was the hug of strength she intended, and together we looked down at Gran, silent.
After a while she sighed and let me go. I almost staggered, but caught myself. I didn’t know I’d been leaning against her. Lacking chairs, we perched on either side of Gran’s cold feet, taking one each to gently rub and warm. Bernadette tried to explain what the doctors had said, which left me perplexed, but at least it was something to talk about. Otherwise we were haltingly quiet.
An artery in Gran’s brain had ruptured. Her blood-sugar levels were fine, so they provisionally blamed it on hypertension. Bernadette was clear on that much, still looking for someone to accept her protests about how Gran’s blood pressure had always been very good. She couldn’t name the profusion of plastic tubes—oxygen to her nose, and IV to carry glucose and meds, an arterial line invading her torso to monitor her blood. The awkward machines with their indecipherable codes were pure mystery voodoo to us both.
Retreat to Love Page 20
